Roundtable #168: The Name of the Game

Will any game title ever surpass the brilliance of Bad Dudes vs. Dragon Ninja?

By IGN Staff

Craig Beridon, IGN Insider: How important is the name of a game? Take Alan Wake for example, that's a terrible name for both a character and a game. Do you think it'll make a difference to sales?

In contrast, would any of us have played Crusty Demons if were called Freestyle Moto-X? Pimp hits or not, I wouldn't have looked at it twice. Just how much affect on a games success do titles have? Will any game title ever surpass the brilliance of Bad Dudes vs. Dragon Ninja?*

*The answer to the Bad Dudes question is no.

Mark Ryan Sallee, IGN Guides: A name can certainly matter. An RPG called Legend of the Green Emerald won't be big. Take the same game and call it Final Fantasy and you've got a multi-million seller. Obviously, familiar names sell games. Just ask Nintendo.

But I think your question is more about bad names holding back the success of games, and I think it's certainly something publishers need to (and do) consider. But even games with awful names can sell, so it's hard to say if a bad name really matters.

And then there's the question of what even makes a bad name? Something that just sounds awful or something that's unmarketable? Old-school Atari and NES games had some of the most awful names, like Hockey and Basketball. But as dumb as those names are, I'm sure it made for easy marketing and selling to consumers; if you want a hockey game you buy the game called Hockey. Conversely, I personally don't think Zone of the Enders is a necessarily bad name (it makes sense within the context of the game, though I might just be a little biased), but there's nothing marketable about it. Without brand recognition, something that convoluted and long just looks like gibberish on game shelves.

I do believe that simple names are better than complex names when it comes to trying to sell a game. Games with titles like Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga surely can't have sold to the mainstream videogame buyer. Before a game title has more than two words, the core brand needs to be recognizable among the mainstream. Massive Heart Thunder: Dawn of Sorrow isn't going to fly, but Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow might.

Meghan Sullivan, IGN DB Editor: It's true: slap a familiar name on a game and idiots will go buy it. How do I know? Two words for you: Mystic Quest.

Doug Perry, IGN Xbox 360: The name of a game matters for perception purposes, targeting the subject matter, and for marketing. In other words, it's really important, but a title with a horrible name could have a great game behind it, and vice versa. Take, for instance, The Outfit. Short, two-syllable name, sounds military. Pretty forgettable game. Or Katamari Damacy, a totally Japanese name that doesn't appear to mean anything in English. Great game. How about Prey? It's a little obscure, it hints at something being hunted, but doesn't have a sub-title that gives it all away, and it's a new IP (even if the game has been in development on and off for years). If THQ or Activision had published it, those companies might have given it a sub-title to clarify or provide sub-text. Peter Jackson's King Kong the Official Game of the Movie is a super ass-sucking title that nobody should have agreed upon. In the end, usually the two things, the name and the game do match up. But for the record, if the game is good and the name sucks, the publisher is likely to correct that matter in the sequel.

David Clayman, IGN Insider: If there's one thing that galls me about game titles it's when marketing and IP get in the way of a simple and memorable name. The most frustrating example of this in recent memory is Marc Ecko's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure. In this case the secondary title is completely useless because 1) it doesn't give us any additional information about the game 2) this is the first game in the series and there's no danger of confusing this with another "Getting Up" title. Add the fact that Ecko must plaster his name on his products and you have a real mouthful.

This phenomenon is what leads us to the parade of nonsensical video game acronyms that are used on message boards, emails, and articles. "Have you checked out the sweet tagging in MEGUCUP?" Megucup? What the hell does that mean?

Another of my most hated naming patterns occurs when publishers have a popular IP that exists across mediums. In this case we end up with early titles like The Godfather: The Movie: The Game. The real magic happens when we add another step to the process and end up with The Godfather: The Movie: The Game: The Guide.

Steve Butts, IGN PC: Yeah, the Mark Ecko stupidity is not unlike Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30. It's just confusing and unnecessary. It also illustrates a real problem in the industry in that developers are already thinking about marketing the damn expansion before the first game is even out. I miss the days when you could just talk about Rainbow Six or Warcraft and people wouldn't be confused about what you're actually talking about. Even more clumsy are the ridiculously punctuated sequels and expansion packs. I'm still not entirely sure where the dashes, commas and semi-colons go in Vampire: The Masquerade, Bloodlines.

As far as a game's title influencing interest and sales, yeah, I think it definitely matters but people will get past a weird or stupid name if the game is fun. Final Fantasy is a perfect example. No marketing person in their right mind would ever intentionally pick a name like that but that hasn't stopped the series from becoming stupidly popular. Maybe it made more sense in Japanese. Hell, look at Donkey Kong.

Since we're talking about titles that sell games, I'd buy a box of cat turds as long as it had a boss name like David Clayman's Chronicles of Adventure: Cry Until Dawn.

Any Eddy, IGN Community Sites: IGN There are obviously a lot of factors that go into why a game sells. Certainly there have been tons of bad games with movie connections that still sell well based on the movie connection. Less so, we've also seen games with horrible names (in the marketing sense, though there have been plain horrible names, also) that have sold well. And then there are titles that deserve a lot of attention for their gameplay, quality, etc., but they don't get into people's hands because they're from small companies and/or don't have brand-name connections.

So, to be perfectly vague, is a game's name important? Yes...and no.

Tetris sold incredibly across a number of platforms in its lifetime, but the name means nothing to any of us. Conversely, the spate of "-tris" games that followed in Tetris' wake--anyone here played Welltris...or Hatris maybe?--didn't seem to have the same popularity.

But it's easy to say that the recent X-Men: The Official Game put up decent numbers mostly because of the comic/movie name link...and its availability just before the movie hit theaters. If it was called Comic Team Scramble, it'd hardly have done as well--though if the gameplay was better and the marketing department put ads on MTV and there was a Comic Team page on MySpace and IGN gave it great review scores...

I miss the days when you could just talk about Rainbow Six or Warcraft and people wouldn't be confused about what you're actually talking about.

Man, I need to play more games. Have there really be six Rainbow games already? I lost track of the series after Rainbow 3 (and Ubisoft started spelling out the numbers in Rainbow Four).

Stephen Ng, IGN FAQs: Gun. It's one of those games no one wants to look up anywhere online.

Black. See "Gun".

Thankfully, some titles like 24 and X3 add the omnipresent "The Game" or "The Official Game" to it, making it somewhat searchable on the web.